Gottlieb named new APCC executive director

Monday

Apr 17, 2017 at 6:24 AM

By Rich Eldred reldred@wickedlocal.com

It’s water, water everywhere and always as far as Andrew Gottlieb is concerned.

Gottlieb left the Cape Cod Water Protection Collaborative, which he ran, on Jan. 3, and Monday he started work as the new Executive Director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, where his focus will be: water.

Gottlieb was at the Collaborative for 10 years. This year, the County Commissioners is considering defunding the collaborative, which gets close to $1 million from Barnstable County coffers.

“It was formed to provide information to communities looking to learn what was happening with their neighboring communities. It was a platform for 15 towns to provide information on issues related to water resources requiring funding assistance, help with zero interest loans for dealing with nutrient loading issues and studying alternative measures to large scale sewer projects,” Gottlieb explained. “We’d look at what alternatives were the right mix of centralized collection and treatment. We were not opposed to centralized collection and treatment but it does not apply to every single situation.”

The goal was and is to provide expertise of wastewater treatment to towns that don’t have the budgets to do the research or hire the staff on their own. And the idea was towns wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel 15 times.

Most towns have written the county commissioners, asking the collaborative be funded next year.

“It feels good to me that the work we were doing is something they would miss,” Gottlieb reflected.

But no matter what the Collaborative will have to miss Gottlieb for he is gone.

“At its core the APCC is concerned about land use and water quality,” Gottlieb said. “So there is a clear connection between the work we have done locally at the county to scale wastewater management to the Cape to make it appropriate to each community in a way that solves water quality problems.”

Gottlieb recognizes there are problems with larger scale sewerage installations, both in obtaining funding locally and politically. That’s why they always focused on alternatives such as utilizing oysters, sawdust pits to remove nitrogen as well as regional collaborative solutions.

“The thing I find attractive about the APCC is it’s a well respected organization with a great track record looking at what I wanted to do, they’ve had success,” Gottlieb said. “I expect to focus more attention on generating positive action politically and institutionally on issues of concern to us. The APCC is credible because it is seen as a fact based organization. We do the herring counts and work on salt marshes to understand how the Cape environment responds to the stresses we place upon it.”

The APCC has always engaged in some advocacy. They recent spoke out against the use of herbicides on Cape Cod electricity right-of-ways.

Gottlieb would like to see the APCC expand its scientific work in more areas.

“We would gather scientific information and use that as a basis for leveraging action. I’d like to see us supercharge that effort and be the face for positive change for the environment,” he declared. “We have an obligation to preserve resources for people who love it here and work here. We will focus a lot of time on building our scientific capability and building a network so we can bring our concerns to local governments for action.”

He brings his expertise in water, which he sees as the top priority for quality, recreation, drinking and the local economy.

He wants to strengthen the finances, which will be needed in an era of government grant funding cuts.

“This is a good place for people to do great work,” he declared. “Water is the basis for everything the Cape is built on. It is what brings people here in the summer. For tourists, for clean drinking water, for shellfish.”

Water quality has declined in bays and freshwater ponds but financial pressures and political battles have slowed action.

“We live on a sand bar,” Gottlieb noted. “And we know about seas rising and storms happening and the impact on our shoreline. Despite the rhetoric this is an issue and the people who live here know it. They see the danger and need to think about what we can do locally to adapt and to advocate for programs and plans that can secure us long term.”